1. Field of the Invention:
This invention relates to a community office (C.O.) switching system in which the uppermost element of its common control hierarchy is a stored program processor. More particularly, it relates to the portions of such a system which are involved in the function of sensing or transmitting supervisory events.
2. Summary of the Invention:
In brief, the invention provides a telephone switching system for telephone lines in a telephone network that carry voice and associated supervisory information signals. The voice signals are received through one of a plurality of ports under the control of a port event processor and are transferred through a switching arrangement, under the control of a call processor, and transmitted through a port again under the control of the port event processor. The received supervisory information is stored in a port data store memory, which also stores call state and command information. The port event processor retrieves the stored supervisory information and commands from the port data store memory, and processes the supervisory information in response to the commands in at least two functional units, and returns processed information for storage in the port data store memory.
This invention is pointed out with particularity in the appended claims. The above and further objects and advantages of this invention may be better understood by referring to the following description taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings.